Spiritual Healing

From 1954 to 1991, the Orioles entertained countless fans within its
massive concrete walls. Shortstop Cal Ripken logged 821 games and 129
home runs there on his way to breaking Lou Gehrig's consecutive-games
record.

Among some circles in blue-collar Baltimore, the game of football is
even more mythical than baseball. For 31 seasons, the city's beloved
Colts also played in the stadium, bringing pride and glory to this
industrial port city. But in 1984, the Colts were trotted off to
Indianapolis, and a few years later, in 1991, the Orioles migrated to
Camden Yards in Baltimore's refurbished Inner Harbor.

Throughout the decades when professional athletics was this
community's rallying point, the families and businesses surrounding the
stadium were guaranteed a comfortable level of social and economic
security. The teams' departure unsettled the local economy, but for the
most part, the middle-class neighborhoods adjusted.

Some, however, did not cope well, and their social fabric is
markedly more tattered than it was even five years ago.

Two blocks south of the stadium, the Montebello Waverly area suffers
from many of the ills sapping urban communities: an influx of drugs,
gangs, and violence as well as rising dropout and teenage-pregnancy
rates.

Given the symptoms, the outcome for this inner-city neighborhood
looks poor. But at the Garden of Prayer Baptist Church, located in the
heart of the troubles, the pastor and his parishioners are refusing to
accept a terminal prognosis. Instead, they are opting to experiment
with their own holistic remedies.

Across the nation, black urban churches like the Garden have
undergone some painful soul-searching in recent years. As a result,
many are repositioning themselves as sources of secular as well as
spiritual succor. And education has become one of their primary ways to
intervene in the lives of those souls most at risk: children and
adolescents.

Tucked among the faded row houses just blocks from the stadium, the
Garden is pulsing with activity on a warm Saturday morning in late
April. Organ music flows through its red-curtained windows into the
parking lot, where volunteers are unloading food from the church van.
Parents and children amble toward the square brick church for a morning
inspirational. On their way, they are welcomed by the Rev. Melvin B.
Tuggle II and his wife, Brenda, who confesses they spend more time here
than in their own home.

"People call us two-four-seven--24 hours a day, seven days a week,"
chuckles Tuggle, a stately, soft-spoken man whose persistent outreach
efforts increased church membership from 12 to 1,300 in 10 years.

This morning, as on most Saturdays from October through May, dozens
of children, ranging in age from 3 to 17, have come to polish their
literacy skills at the church's Calvin W. Williams Reading Center and
Library.

After Tuggle leads the youngsters and their teachers in a short
prayer, the playful group strolls across the tree-lined street to two
small, white clapboard houses.

"A few years ago, you would not have recognized these buildings,"
laughs Brenda, who directs the reading center, as she opens the screen
door to one. What were once crack houses are today miniature schools
with cozy classrooms. Their sparkling walls are lined with
floor-to-ceiling bookshelves featuring a set of the 1996 World Book
Encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia of Black America, and scores
of National Geographic magazines. One room has four personal
computers and a television hooked up to a videocassette recorder.

The renovation was made possible by donations from church members,
notably Philadelphia Eagle Calvin W. Williams, whose framed
green-and-white football jersey hangs in the entryway.

On the first floor, three classes are in progress. Although class
opens and closes with a prayer, what happens in between is strictly
secular. Around one table, six 5th-grade girls work with their teachers
on vocabulary words. They are preparing for an upcoming standardized
test.

Nearby, the Rev. Teresa Chapman, an associate pastor, encourages
four teenagers to talk about their creative--writing assignment on the
theme "life is a test." "Not all tests are written," she tells them.
"You are examined everywhere--at home, in church, even on the
street."

Personal attention is the center's hallmark. The children are
divided by age into classes that range in size from two to eight
youngsters. Several teachers work with each group.

Five years ago, as the Tuggles describe it, they had a vision to
start the reading center as a way to counter the dismal reading scores
in the school district. Last year, Baltimore city students earned the
lowest reading scores in the state on the annual Maryland School
Performance Assessment.

A 1st-grade teacher in Baltimore's public schools with a master's
degree in reading, Brenda Tuggle coordinates the program. At the start
of each school year, she sends a letter to the children's teachers
asking them to identify strengths and weaknesses. She also reviews the
city's test results to see where the students are struggling.

"Language development is critical to a child's development," she
observes. "It's especially important in black families, because they
don't talk with the children as much on a daily basis."

The public school teachers welcome the supplemental help, says
Tuggle, and most allow their students to bring textbooks home over the
weekend so they can use them at the center.

Currently, 12 volunteers teach the 53 students for two hours each
Saturday. Most are not professional teachers. Before the start of each
semester, Tuggle organizes a training program for them, which she
supplements with biweekly skill-building lessons.

Many of the children and their teachers worship at the church, but
the free program is open to any student in Baltimore. "It's the
best-kept secret in the city," boasts Rev. Tuggle.

In addition to building literacy skills and vocabulary, the center
offers a way for children to form relationships with adults.

This morning, Yusef Shabazz starts his reading class with a short
game of touch football outside. After a few minutes, he moves his
students, two 10-year-old boys who are having trouble in school, inside
to work on their reading skills.

"It's a good feeling and a good avenue for helping the community,"
says the full-time graduate student. "They present challenges, and I
can't always assume there is one way to get the information
across."

Many of the teachers, including Shabazz, have children who attend
the center.

"Parents just don't have the time to be able to give children all
they need, and teachers can't do it all," says Marcia Hardy, who
teaches the 8-year-olds. "Now, the church is having to step up and play
a bigger role. It really helps me out."

Other parents are equally thankful for the program but are less
conciliatory toward the public schools, which they feel are failing
them and their children.

"Recently, they made 60 passing. It made me cry. Sometimes, it feels
like they want the black males to stay at that level," sighs Hortense
Wallace, another volunteer and the mother of a 16-year-old boy. "I
thought schools were supposed to make kids as advanced as
possible."

"I feel our children are really privileged to be here. It's like
what some private institutions offer," says Gwendolyn Crawford, who
teaches the 11- year-olds. "But I feel very let down by our public
schools--they don't give the kids the attention they need. We hear
about the problems in the newspaper every day, but when are they going
to do something about them?"

But rather than waiting for the government to solve their
communities' problems, more and more black churches are taking matters
into their own hands.

"If the church doesn't do something for these kids, then we are
going to lose them," observes Dr. Gloria White-Hammond, a pediatrician
whose husband is the pastor of Boston's African Methodist Episcopal
Bethel Church. "When the government loses interest, and kids and
violence are no longer the flavor of the month, then we'll sell a few
more chicken dinners so we can do what we have to."

Churches can offer youngsters the sense of community lacking in many
urban neighborhoods, says White-Hammond, a graduate student at Harvard
University's divinity school. "Many children don't know the people
living around their houses. The church is in a unique position to
provide a real community, to find people who can help you with your
problems, and who will keep loving you."

As a result, she says, the church is the best vehicle for meeting
the spiritual, physical, and emotional needs of children, black or
white.

"Black kids are the manifestation of what's wrong in youth culture,"
she says, "but the same problems are affecting children in the
suburbs."

From small storefront congregations to imposing stone edifices,
black churches are tailoring their education programs to target their
community's needs. Often, they are providing additional staffing,
resources, professional skills, and a faith that their children can be
saved.

Leading this crusade are some of the communities' strongest and most
respected leaders, their pastors.

"The church goes back to African religion and society, where the
fate of the individual was directly related to the fate of the
community," observes the Rev. Alicia D. Byrd, the director of
theological education and leadership-development programs for the
Congress of National Black Churches in Washington. "The pastor
continues the tradition of an African elder or chief. There is a
tremendous power vested there."

From Baltimore to Chicago, pastors are using this power to recruit
volunteers from their congregations. The potential support is
impressive. Byrd's organization represents more than 19 million members
and 65,000 congregations.

"We are at a crossroads. We are facing the worst crisis since
slavery, and unless we mobilize, we could lose the opportunity to save
our children in America," says the Rev. Henry M. Williamson Jr., the
pastor of Carter Temple Christian Methodist Episcopal Church on
Chicago's South Side.

Attuned to the pulse of their neighborhoods, pastors are
collaborating with principals, superintendents, and teachers to design
solutions to the myriad problems overwhelming many inner-city
schools.

"We were a bunch of Baptist preachers who got together and were
tired of seeing our kids not being educated," says the Rev. Damon Lynch
Jr. of Cincinnati. "When kids were suspended or expelled from school,
they roamed the streets, terrorized businesses, and became a nuisance
in the community." Two years ago, the city's Baptist Ministers'
Conference had a brainstorm: Open up the churches to these youngsters,
tutor them to keep up with their classmates, and teach them
conflict-resolution skills.

Clergy as well as educators view this trend as a natural alliance
whose time has come.

"Schools and churches are some of the most powerful institutions in
a community. It's like IBM and GM forming a partnership. They're going
to come up with solutions," says Williamson, who in 1991 founded the
One Church/One School program, a national effort to formally link
public schools with churches.

In many neighborhoods, educators are welcoming the churches and
their volunteers with open arms.

"I don't think we can survive as an educational institution without
all of the community's support," says William Reese Jr., the principal
of Theodore Roosevelt High School in Gary, Ind. "Churches are leaders
in that area. The pastors and parishioners have been very receptive
about working with us at the high school level, and that's rare."

This relationship is a fairly recent phenomenon. For generations,
concerns over violating the constitutional separation of church and
state kept the two institutions at a wary distance. Economic pressures
and a sense of desperation, however, have forced them to collaborate in
pursuing their common goal of nurturing healthy children.

"Sometimes, the dividing lines are somewhat artificial--schools
can't be in the business of promoting religion, but they can be a place
where people can work out their faith," says Byrd of the national
black-church congress.

Educators are quick to point out that their new partners are not in
the schools to proselytize.

"This is not religious teaching. It's a very secular initiative,"
Superintendent James Hawkins of the Gary school district says of the
One Church/One School program. "I don't know of one individual who has
been opposed to it, even parents."

Melvin Tuggle's business card bears the following verse from St.
Paul's second letter to the Corinthians: "For we walk by faith and not
by sight."

Were it not for faith, the Garden would still be a hill covered with
junk cars. When he took over the congregation in 1986, the church was
located in a rented garage several blocks from the current site. On the
fifth Sunday in August, Tuggle preached his first sermon to six adults
and six children. "I came blinded, and I'm glad I did," he admits
today.

Initially, Tuggle nurtured the church by asking neighborhood parents
to send their children to Sunday school. He enticed them with the
promise of free baby-sitting.

As the Garden and its pastor grew in stature, Tuggle decided to try
to buy the garage he had so painstakingly transformed into a
church.

His parishioners held bake sales and tithed to raise the necessary
funds. But the landlord refused to sell. Impressed by the church's
outreach work, however, he offered them a free piece of land
nearby.

"I wanted to leap with joy," Tuggle remembers. "I ran up there in
the dark, pitch black with the dogs barking and began praying to God
that it would work out."

In the light of day, however, he saw that the narrow lot was covered
with old cars and surrounded by crack houses.

Faith, he says, saw him and his wife through the next few years of
challenges. On the fifth Sunday in August 1992, the new Garden of
Prayer Church opened its doors to Montebello Waverly's multiracial
community. Since that day, neighbors, both black and white, have come
to see the church as a godsend.

The church operates a food pantry, distributes warm clothes in the
winter, and sponsors health activities. All of its services are
available to neighbors, whether they are church members or not.

It also supports the nearby Stadium School, the city's only charter
school. Worried about rising dropout rates in the middle and high
schools, neighborhood parents lobbied the school board several years
ago to create the new grade 4-8 school.

"The Garden let our students use their facilities for a project they
were doing to buy school uniforms," says Alexine Campbell, the school's
parent liaison. "Rev. Tuggle was the first minister to let us hold a
bake sale. He has indicated that anytime we need anything, to come to
him."

Above all, however, neighbors view the church as a haven for
neighborhood children. "When I was young, we had rec centers and other
places to go," recalls Jocelyn Bynum, a longtime resident. "The Garden
gives the kids someplace to go without getting hurt. It's a lifesaver.
They can go there to socialize and do homework without hanging out on
the corner."

As government and private sector support for inner cities shrinks,
pastors like Tuggle are realizing that bake sales and chicken dinners
are not going to fund the scope of services they must now provide.

Given the Republicans' election-year mantra to transfer federal
responsibility for welfare to the states, black churches are acutely
aware that the demands placed on them and other nonprofit organizations
may soon increase dramatically.

In preparation for the worst, churches have started to look beyond
their immediate communities for additional financial support. Slowly,
they are becoming more sophisticated about fund raising, says Audrey B.
Daniel of the Council on Foundations. While Roman Catholic churches and
Jewish synagogues have long known how to tap the world of philanthropy,
African-American churches are just learning about this avenue, she
says.

Since 1991, the council's Philanthropy and the Black Church project
has brought about 3,000 pastors and 500 grantmakers together in
regional conferences.

"We're still finding pastors who are amazed to learn that you don't
have to squeeze blood from a turnip," says Daniel, who directs the
project.

Funders have long recognized that African-American churches would
make excellent intermediaries but have been unsure how to connect with
them.

"Black churches are in neighborhoods that we would like to help, but
the proposals just aren't there," says Ann Richards, a writer at the
Charles Stewart Mott Foundation in Flint, Mich.

The council's program seeks to change that dynamic and foster a
professional network between the two groups.

Although the council cannot yet measure the impact of its program,
the tide is turning, says Robert M. Franklin, a program officer for the
the New York City-based Ford Foundation's Rights and Social Justice
program. "I do have the sense that the wall of separation between
church and philanthropy is receding," Franklin says. "Religious
organizations have a long track record in the area of social services
and would benefit with input from secular experts."

Some of that secular expertise will come from initiatives like one
being planned at the Harvard divinity school. With a grant from the New
York City-based Henry Luce Foundation, the faculty are planning a
summer 1998 institute for 1998 to teach several hundred members of the
black clergy how to better acquire the resources they need for their
work in urban areas.

In Baltimore, Melvin Tuggle has already begun to tap the foundation
world for the support he needs. Over the past four years, he has worked
closely with Johns Hopkins University to implement a $2 million grant
from the Battle Creek, Mich-based W. K. Kellogg Foundation to foster
community-based health projects. He recently met with representatives
from Baltimore's Hoffberger Foundation and the Princeton, N.J.-based
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, who are considering his church as
potential location for a "Sight and Soul" health promotion project.

Despite his ease in the philanthropy arena, Tuggle says his church
is still poor. "I have a problem with churches that have money in the
bank. We're broke every Monday after we pay our bills, and that's the
way I like it."

On a philosophical note, he pauses to dwell on the dual role of
churches. "What if the girl up the street doesn't have any shoes or the
woman next door has no food, and what if God came back. What would I
say to him?"

He would have a lot to say.

Undoubtedly, he would describe the programs his church has created
to help its children grow up strong and healthy.

Soon after the reading center closes at the end of May, summer camp
begins. Last year, 100 students attended, with the church footing the
bill for those who couldn't afford it.

There are also the boys-and-girls clubs, the drama club, the mother/
daughter mentoring program, the college-scholarship program, and the
annual fishing trip for the boys, and this year, the girls as well.

During a Sunday service earlier this spring, Melvin Tuggle offered
paid summer jobs to any teenager who wanted to work for the church.

"Where will we get the money from? God will give it to us
somehow."

As always, faith is his internal compass.

At noon, classes at the reading center end. After a short closing
prayer, the students grab their backpacks and hustle outside. Their
teachers linger inside to chat with each other and the Tuggles about
the day's lessons. Across the street, the church bursts with the sound
of infectious gospel music. The men's choir is practicing for
tomorrow's Sunday service.

"The neighbors were afraid that a black church would be noisy, and
we are," grins Brenda as her 5-year-old daughter, Tierra, hops nearby.
"But now, people know us and like us."

The choir is another effort to heal the community. It brings
together men of all ages, with the older ones acting as role models and
sounding boards for the younger ones.

As the pastor's wife walks around the parking lot, chatting with the
friends she now calls her family, she points to the church's back wall.
"It was built to come down," she says. "Someday, we're going to have to
expand."

That expansion will include building an after-school youth center
with athletic facilities and a larger library. But like today's reading
center, that's just a transitional stage in the Garden's final
design.

"Rev. Tuggle's ultimate dream is to have a K-12 school," Brenda
Tuggle confides.

School Links

In Gary, Ind., each of the city's 42 public schools is partnered
with at least one church. Since 1992, pastors have teamed up with
principals to identify ways in which their churches could help out the
schools. Then, they have found the necessary resources and staffing
from within their congregations.

This web of relationships falls under the rubric of the One
Church/One School program, a national initiative launched in 1991 by
the Rev. Henry M. Williamson Sr., the pastor of Chicago's Carter Temple
Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.

Many urban churches, he believes, are in the position to assist
overburdened public schools.

"We have more parents on Sunday than most PTAs have all year round,"
Williamson says. "We have the volunteers and the resources. We can say
to our congregations that our mission is down the street at the
school."

The relationship is purely secular, explains John W. Finn, an
assistant to the schools superintendent who coordinates Gary's program.
Above all, he says, the churches provide men and women who can be in
the schools on a regular basis for students.

At the city's Theodore Roosevelt High School, "Stop the Violence"
was the theme for the spring's One Church/One School program. A cadre
of lawyers and judges taught the 11th-grade class a six-week course on
the law. The semester concluded with a mock trial of one student who
had allegedly injured another student, and the 240 students formed the
jury.

The course served as a dry run for the school's new court.
Twenty-five students will be trained next year to make disciplinary
decisions about their fellow students' behavior.

At the same time, 25 ministers worked in small groups with students
and teachers to discuss and participate in role-playing exercises
designed to highlight such character issues as honesty, humility, and
cooperation.

One Church/One School partnerships have taken hold in other cities,
including Dallas, Chicago, and Cleveland, but Gary is the only district
to have adopted the program systemwide.

"I don't understand why every school district in the nation would
not want to have a program like this," says Gary Superintendent James
Hawkins. "If one were to ask can you tangibly measure the academic
gains the kids make, no one could answer that. But in terms of changes
in attitude, behavior, and relationships, it has made a huge
difference."

A few years ago, the Rev. Damon Lynch Jr. and some fellow Baptist
pastors got fed up with paying taxes to educate the children in their
Cincinnati neighborhoods.

Given the numbers of students, especially black males, who were
being suspended and expelled by the city's schools, they reasoned the
state was not doing its job.

"If a child has been put out on the streets by a school, then where
is the education?" Lynch asks. "The school gets money for something
it's not doing."

The pastors, all members of the city's Baptist Ministers'
Conference, petitioned the state, arguing that the situation was
illegal. They asked for their money back. Not surprisingly, the answer
was no.

Like pastors in other urban communities who have been confronted by
weaknesses in the local education system, they devised their own
solution.

"We said, 'OK, we'll open up our churches and take in all of those
you put out,'" Lynch recalls. "'We'll teach them peer-mediation and
work on their homework, so that when theirtime is up, they'll be fit
specimens to learn in your schools.'"

In 1992, they established six Alternative Learning Centers and
staffed them with church volunteers. Over time, they have acquired
computers, software, and other resources.

School administrators tell suspended and expelled students about the
centers. Enrollment is voluntary, but parents must be involved in the
decision.

On any given school day, up to 60 students, ranging from 1st to 12th
graders, fill the centers. Last year, the centers served more than 400
children.

Pleased by the centers' success in luring students off the streets,
local businesses have donated money to the program.

City officials are also "in the groove," Lynch says. Next fall, the
ministers' conference plans to open Project Succeed Academy, a school
specifically for suspended and expelled students, in a building they
hope the city will provide.

"It's stupid to penalize a child forever," Lynch says. "Why would I
want to hoard knowledge and be so devilish? It's a gift, and I should
want to pass it on to someone else."

Jeff Carr started working as a summer intern at the Bresee
Foundation in the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles 10 years
ago. He was given a 10-speed bicycle and a basketball and told to start
a community youth program.

Today, as the foundation's executive director, the ordained Church
of the Nazarene minister coordinates a network of technology and
literacy after-school programs that reach more than 1,000 youngsters a
year.

The nonprofit charitable foundation was established by the city's
100-year old First Church of the Nazarene. Many churches in the
neighborhood double as learning centers where "young people in the
margins," as Carr describes them, receive reading assistance and
incentives to stay in school.

One source of motivation is a state-of-the-art computer lab that has
18 stations with direct access to the Internet. Another is a
graphic-design business that hires young people.

"We're trying to increase the capacity of kids to learn technology
because there is such a lack of it in the schools," Carr says. "We're
trying to even up the odds."

This pinch-hitting is necessary, he says, because California schools
are severely underfunded. He fears that helping these children may get
a lot tougher during this election year, as politicians promise lower
taxes and leaner government.

"We can't handle all of the people we're trying to handle now, even
with the government programs in place," Carr says. "If there are more
cuts, we're not going to be able to respond. Churches have a role to
play, but so does the government."

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